#239 — October 23, 2019

Read on the Web

StatusCode
Covering the week's news in software development, infrastructure, ops, platforms, and performance.

Dapr: Microsoft's New, Portable, Event-driven, Runtime for Distributed Apps — Dapr provides building blocks for microservices and is language-agnostic (though it’s built in Go which is kinda cool). It also provides bindings for common infrastructure items, such as pub/sub messaging. There’s more detail in the announcement blog post.

Microsoft

How AWS Built a Production Service using Serverless Technologies — The creatively named ‘Realworld Serverless Application’ is a project inspired by Amazon’s work on the development of the Serverless Application Repository which itself is built as a production-grade serverless system. Trek10’s Forrest Brazeal also provides some analysis of AWS’s approach.

Naseem, Gupta, and Paracha (AWS)

Managed PostgreSQL by DigitalOcean — Worry-free database hosting. Deploy a highly scalable PostgreSQL cluster with no admin overhead.

DigitalOcean sponsor

Firefox 70 Released — Includes a variety of CSS improvements, password generation for input type=’password’ fields, plus social tracking protection and ‘Lockwise’ password syncing. There’s also the usual Firefox 70 for developers list of key changes and updates.

Mozilla

DNS Security: Threat Modeling DNSSEC, DoT, and DoH — Analysis of the threats surrounding modern attempts at securing DNS.

Jan Schaumann

Bazel 1.0: Google's Open Source Build System — Bazel is an open source build system designed to support a wide variety of programming languages and platforms.

Google Open Source

Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

Have You Tried Vettery? — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

💬 Stories and Opinions

Automated Continuous Deployment at Heroku — Changes made to the popular PaaS platform by its developers are now rolled out globally within hours without any human intervention. Here’s the how and why.

Heroku

AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data — It’s no big secret that most cloud providers make much of their money on egress charges (i.e. bandwidth) but individual AWS customers have paid into the multi-millions moving their data out of the service.

The Information

AWS Cross-AZ Data Transfer Costs More Than AWS Says — Carrying on the AWS data charge thread.. hats off to Corey for running a real experiment in intra-AWS data transfer where he discovered you get charged for both sending and receiving.

Corey Quinn

How Was Life for a Regular Dev During The 'Dot Com Bust'? — I was in the industry in the early 2000s and it was no picnic, but it’s interesting to see what others experienced.

Hacker News

Set Up a Status Page in Minutes — Learn more about how StatusHub can help you communicate during downtime.

StatusHub sponsor

How DataDome Stores 200,000 Documents Per Second in Elasticsearch

DataDome

Will Automation Wipe Out the Role of the DBA? — Automation is eating up tasks traditionally held by the database administrator, but ultimately it frees them up to work on bigger things.

ThinkAutomation

The Decline of Stack Overflow — Been seeing this sort of sentiment a lot recently. Just part of the natural ebb and flow of services, perhaps.

John Slegers

Should We Rebrand 'JavaScript'? — I think most of us can agree there are problems with ‘JavaScript’ as a name, but is it worth rebranding it? “JS” is certainly one option.

Kieran Potts

🛠 Code and Tools

No Maintenance Intended: A Way to Mark Your Projects as Unmaintained — A badge and brief explaining page you can link to from your own projects if you want to make the point that you’re not actively maintaining them.

Potch

DNSApe: Simple, Fast Online DNS Tools — Quickly grab DNS records, check DNS traversal, DNS caches at 14 different servers, and a few other things.

srvAudit Skunkworks

via-ipv6: Enabling IPv4 Sites for IPv6 Only Networks — A project to enable access to certain IPv4 only sites on IPv6 only networks.

Nico Schottelius

The Internet Exchange Map — A map depicting over 300 active Internet exchanges and more than 500 buildings in which those exchanges reside.

TeleGeography

Speed Up Frontend Development with FaunaDB's Auth and Native GraphQL

FaunaDB sponsor

Lesser Known Coding Fonts — A topic that people rarely get bored of, it seems.

Vernon Foley

SHOUT.sh: Converts ALL_CAPS Commands to sudo-ed Commands — Not so much practical as an interesting joke.

Monsieur Cellophane

A Alpine Linux Docker Image with Bleeding Edge Nginx-Powered HTTP/3 Support — A Linux image with Nginx with HTTP/3 (QUIC), TLSv1.3, 0-RTT, and Brotli support. “All built on the bleeding edge for max performance.”

Ranadeep Polavarapu

A Repository of Email Marketing Legislation Around the World — A good start, though it’d be great to see it fleshed out even more.

EmailOctopus